ICTlogy

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Contemporaneous Culture Center of Barcelona) is organizing the Research and innovation in the cultural sphere conference (I+C+i in its abbreviation in Catalan) during the whole year 2009.

On March 31, 2009, there is a session belonging to the conference entitled I+C+i. Liberty, equality and P2P, chaired by Olivier Schulbaum and I, and imparted by Michel Bauwens.

I have been invited to provide a very brief framework about the subject, so that Bauwens can go straight to the core of the issue and deal with the revolutions that P2P can bring to the creation of culture, political and civic engagement and participation or the producing economy.

So, in 10 minutes I will present the main lines of the following statements:

• Digital tools have reduced marginal costs of transactions nearly to zero, making necessary a redefinition of concepts such as firm, group, distance, original & copy, send, time, etc.
• The most important commodity in the Information Society is information. It acts as input, output and capital at the same time and it is not scarce, but abundant. Value is not embedded in itself (as, say, food) but in being able to convert it into knowledge.
• P2P is free circulation of information, based on two assumptions: information is abundant (valueless) and transactions are costless.
• There is a huge potential in P2P to foster many advancements in society — way beyond file sharing — like government and politics (goverati, citizen mashups), education (casual and distributed education, deschooled society), science (open science, eScience, eResearch, grids) or production (design & fabs, networking), just to name a few.

Follow and participate

• March 31, 2009. CCCB (El Mirador), Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona.
• Live in streaming in Open Server
• Official hashtag: #leP2P
• Michel Bauwens @ Twitter: @mbauwens
• Platoniq @ Twitter: @platoniq
• Ismael Peña-López @ Twitter: @ictlogist
• I+C+i. Liberty, equality and P2P (part II)

More information

• The Political Economy of Peer Production, by Michel Bauwens
• La economía política de la Producción entre iguales, de Michel Bauwens
• P2P Foundation
• P2P Foundation (en Español)
• Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, by Yochai Benkler

Thanks go to Oliver Schulbaum for always counting on me.

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